All Tiger data for download?

[Schuyler Erle]

* On  4-Mar-2005 at  7:56AM PST, Frank Warmerdam said:
>
> I haven't used tgr2shp, but I will say that using ogr2ogr for tiger
> data still leaves you quite a bit of postprocessing to do if you want
> to extract all the polygons, relate the landmarks and so forth.  The
> OGR TIGER/Line driver pretty much brings over the tiger tables
> directly without interpretation.  The only real "work" it does is to
> form the complete chains from the pieces so at least the linework
> is well formed after translation.
>
> If you need polygon and other information from TIGER/Line, you
> may find that TGR2SHP does more of the "ground work" for you.
> On the other hand, with python scripting you can do nearly
> anything with the OGR driver.

Actually, I've done most of the work already. ;-) See
http://mappinghacks.com/projects/tiger2pgsql/ for the script that does
most of the work. You must have a recent version of GDAL/OGR and a
PostGIS data base, and you must have tigerpoly.py from the GDAL Python
examples (or the one from mappinghacks.com) stored in the same
directory as the tigerimport.sh script.  Once you've imported the
layers into PostGIS, it is trivial to use ogr2ogr to extract them to
Shapefiles. The CompleteChain, Landmarks, AreaLandMarks, and Polygon
layers are supported.

Don't buy proprietary software to work with TIGER/Line - support the
Free Software that works with it instead.  Please let me know if you
use this script, and have either success or difficulty.

SDE